Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us by Daniel Pink takes common ideas about what motivates people and turns them on their head to reveal that autonomy, a love of learning and creating things are the best motivators. He compares studies that have been done over the last 4 decades to the common practices of businesses the world over to demonstrate that the “carrot-and-stick” approach really doesn’t work.

Some fantastic ideas for motivating yourself, people you work with, students, children to be the best you can be. Watch the video below for more information.

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Big Bang by Simon Singh explains the history and development of the big bang model of the universe. It covers the scientists involved as well as the various hypotheses and experiments that have helped form our understanding of the universe we live in. Ranging back to the Ancient Greeks measuring the distance to the sun, through Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to the discovery of the cosmic background radiation from the big bang itself.

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Paradox: The Nine Greatest Engimas in Science by Jim Al-Khalili is a collection of his favourite puzzles and conundrums in sciencefrom Einstein’s theories about space and time, to the latest ideas of how the quantum world works. Some of the “perceived paradoxes” may be familiar, such as Schrödinger’s famous cat, which is seemingly alive and dead at the same time; or the Grandfather Paradox – if you travelled back in time and killed your grandfather you would not have been born and would not therefore have killed your grandfather. Other paradoxes will be new to you, but no less bizarre and fascinating.

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For over 700 years the international language of science was Arabic. In Pathfinders, Jim Al-Khalili celebrates the forgotten, inspiring pioneers who helped shape our understanding of the world during the golden age of Arabic science, including Iraqi physicist Ibn al-Haytham, who practised the modern scientific method over half a century before Bacon; al-Khwarizmi, the greatest mathematician of the medieval world; and Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a Persian polymath to rival Leonardo da Vinci.

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The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins is a graphic science book aimed at children and young adults. It describes lots of different natural phenomena, and explains the myths, folklore or legends that have been used to explain those phenomena and then how science explains them.

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This blog holds a crowd sourced list of books that science teachers would recommend to their students or each other to read. It might be that you use this list to suggest books for your school library, or you buy them cheaply (charity shops) to lend out to students from your classroom.

It is also the home of the weekly Science TV and Radio Guide collated by@a_weatherall and @mrsdrsarah (whose brilliant idea it was in the first place). Each week we post a spreadsheet that contains most (if not all) of the week’s science on the TV and Radio along with recommendations. The idea is that you can share science programmes with your students, and point them towards things that they might not have watched by themselves. We also trawl the internet for good science videos for you to use in class.

Suggest books by tweeting with the hashtag #sciteachlib or adding a comment to this post. Try to include author and link to book on Amazon etc. I will curate the list and ask suggestors to post a review in comments. Hope you find this resource useful. More book reviews to be posted very soon. I would love to have some guest reviews of good science books if people have time. Send me a tweet if you fancy submitting a review @a_weatherall.